perfsonar development work

[Nicolas Simar <>]

Hi Andras,

Andras Kovacs wrote:
> Hi Nicolas,
>
>
> I'm sorry about not coming back to you for a while. 

I do apologise about this.

> It seems, now we
> have the very first draft concept on the monitoring we would like to do
> with the SA6 group.
>
> Our goal is to monitor H.323 and SIP connectivity between
> NRENs/countries, which would require test calls to initiate.

I have got questions below will help me to understand a little bit more 
how you intend to use the tool and information. This will allow us (at 
least me ;-) ) to identify the best way of doing it. Moreover the answer 
will come handy when we will need to extend the perfSONAR schema.

Please answer this email bits by bits (as there are quite a lot of 
questions)

If some information are not specified yet, just mention it.

About the monitoring tool itself:

a) What test tool do you plan to use to monitor H.323 and SIP connectivity?

b) Can you describe how the test tool work:
- how it is triggered (by a user)
- how does work the tests?
- how is a test triggered? (is there the need to synchronise both side 
of connection? or can a test be launched from one side? )
- how many packets are exchanged during a test

A diagram similar to : http://e2epi.internet2.edu/owamp/details.html or 
http://e2epi.internet2.edu/bwctl/architecture.html would be helpful.

> At this stage we have the following plans:
>
> 1. We studied PerfSONAR and found suitable for SA6 goals.

Glad to hear it :-)

> 2. SA6 would develop appropriate CLI applications to be used as an MP
> feeding data into local RRD. The current PerfSONAR CLI wrapper
> application could be used to do this.

- The CLI MP is developed by Guilherme Fernandez from RNP.
It seems at this stage a reasonable choice. (another possible choice 
might have been the BWCTL MP). We will be able to say more once we got a 
better understanding of how work the tool you plan to use.

- I would wish to understand a little bit better the operational model 
you have in mind for those tools.

a) The MP gives you the ability to trigger an on-demand tests.

b) Who are the consumer of the data? (please feel free to redirect me to 
any of your internal documents :-) )
Video-conferencing administrators from the NRENs, from a university, the 
video-conferencing users?

c) How will they access the information? (what visualisation tool, you 
hinted one below) How will it be the data represented to them?
You mention a clickable weathermap. Can you provide a little bit more 
information about this.
(please see a status page: http://perfsonar.acad.bg/status/ and how we 
might be building another similar page for the network services at a 
later stage: http://wiki.geant2.net/bin/view/SA3/SaThreeAppNrenStatusPage)

d) Who will be triggering the tests?
Video-conferencing administrators from the NRENs, any video-conferencing 
users, an automated scheduler (for regular testing, the scheduler sends 
at regular interval on-demand tests to the MP)?

e) How many of those tools do you foresee deployed within each network?

f) Where do you need to locate them? (anywhere in the network, next to 
MCU or gatekeepers?)
The bottomline questions are
- what do you want to observe?
- what do you want to capture as change of behavior?
(I am clueless about video-conferencing monitoring)

g) Do you foresee to have a single MA to which all the MP send the data 
for all the European networks? Of do you foresee that each 
network/country will have one MA to which all the national MP will be 
sending the data? (or any other combination).

h) I am uncertain about the capability to write into an MA (lack of 
knowledge). I am checking this with Guilherme :-)

i) Can you specify what information you will be pushing to the RRD MA? 
(up/down or other informations?)

j) The RRD MA and the SQL MA have a write interfaces that allows an MP 
to push information to an MA.

k) An alternative to the RRD MA is the SQL MA. (an SQL MA is more 
appropriate to store status information than an RRD).

l) How frequently will this tests be done.

Once we got a better understanding of how it works and the direction we 
will take, I foresee the following steps
- extend the NM-WG schema
- integrate the measurement tool within the MP
- extend the MA (write interface, read interface and DB schema)

> 3. RRD MA could be used to populate this historical data towards the
> infrastructure.

Any visualisation tool that can perform the querry to the MA to request 
your data would be able to display that information. Once you got the 
building blocks (MA, MP), it then become easy to build visualisation 
tool making use of those information.



> 4. It would be ideal to use the current PC infrastructure you have
> depolyed in the framework of JRA1, MDM, etc. for this measurements. What
> do you think how could we step forward with this? 

First step is to get an understanding of what the measurment tool does 
and how frequently it will be called. We need to investigate this with 
Erlangen.
We got several types of PC we used for the MDM. One for the OWD and 
BWCTL measurments and anotherone that can be conveniently used to run 
those measurment. But it depends where you need to have the probe.

> Although, the MP and
> its wrapper should be conveniently packaged, to allow NREN people to
> easily deploy and use it on their own infrastrucutre.

Yes.
Conveniently package and easy to deploy are terms that needs to be 
defined ;-)

> 5. In the near future, we have to investigate the possible impacts of
> our measurements on other measurement you currently run on the PerfSONAR
> infrastructure.

>  - The actual status can be extracted from the RRD (last measured data). 

You can do that (RRD or SQL see previous comment)

> What do you think is it a good approach? 

What other approach have you got in mind?

> Should we log into a normal SQL DB as well, in order to allow a better way to 
> extract the last measured data? This could be used as a long term measurement 
> log (RRD cannot be used for this).

I am not sure I understand the question.

>  - A historical yes/no graph will be shown when the user clicks to a cell. 
> This will come from the RRD directly.

I am confused (it's getting late). You are still mentioning the same 
clickable map?

>  - We would like to have this open monitoring service with no authentication. 

No problem, authentication is not mandatory (you just don't need to 
configure it).

> What do you think is the PerfSONAR infrastructure DoS-able this way? If yes, 
> we have to think of authentication.

Yes it can be used to DoS (depending on how the tool works).
We can also wait to have one DoS before going along that road if you 
need to leave it open to anybody (it depends who is your user base). At 
this stage, the most important is to build a tool that fit the purpose. 
Security can be added once the basic goal have been demonstrated.

(note that I don't know if the CL MP uses at this stage authentication)

> This question is still there: Can we use currently deployed PerfSONAR PC 
> servers to do this measurements?

To be investigated with Erlangen.

> If you think we could have a short VC/TC. Let me know. 

Yes, definitely, I am suggesting the 10th of January, at 15:00 CET? (or 
earlier).

I would suggest to involve:
- Guilherme: CL MP developer
- Roman: RRD MA and SQL MA developers
- Maciej: invovled in JRA1 and SA6
- Erlangen: have experience wiht MP (BWCTL)

Cheers,

--
Nicolas
______________________________________________________________________

Nicolas Simar
Network Engineer

DANTE - www.dante.net

Tel - BE: +32 (0) 4 366 93 49
Tel - UK: +44 (0)1223 371 300
Mobile: +44 (0) 7740 176 883

City House, 126-130 Hills Road
Cambridge CB2 1PQ
UK
_____________________________________________________________________